Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to rubber compositions and more particularly, to rubber compositions useful for making tires or semi-finished products for tires.
Description of the Related Art
Tire designers must often deal with conflicting requirements when they design a new tread for a tire. Tire consumers want to have tires that grip well in the snow as well as on dry and wet roads, they want low rolling resistance tires that require tires be designed with low hysteresis and they want tires with good wear properties so they can run the tires for many miles without wearing them out.
Improving grip and wear at the same time remains a constant challenge to the tire designer. It is well known in the industry that tire designers often compromise on certain tire performance characteristics since often each improvement to one characteristic is offset by a decline in another tire performance characteristic. Such is the case for tire wear and wet traction. There is a compromise that tire designers must reach since when they try to achieve an improvement in the wear properties of the tire there is often a decrease in the braking performance of the tire. For example it is known that adding a polybutadiene to a rubber composition will result in improved wear but it is know that it also results in a decrease in traction. Therefore, tire designers are looking for improvements to their designs that allow them to break this compromise, i.e., achieve an improvement in wear without a corresponding decrease in another tire property such as braking.
New materials are useful for breaking compromises and tire designers are developing new materials that can be successfully integrated into rubber compositions that are used to build tires.